ort of a way. They said that they thought the
rectorship of Cailsham was rather too responsible a post for him.
They asked him to accept the other in such a way that it would have
been hard to refuse. Of course, they couldn't actually turn him out.
But mother hated him for going. It was soon after we left there that
I came up to you in London. They were getting so poor. My brother
couldn't be kept up at Oxford. The governess had to go. Father died
not long after I left. I know what he died of. They called it a general
break-up."

"Oh--I know that," said Janet. "There's the shot-gun
prescription--all the pharmacopoeia ground into a pill and fired
down the patient's throat. It must hit something. That general
break-up is the double-barrelled diagnosis. You believe it was the
resignation of the rectorship that finished him."

"Yes--I'm sure of it. I remember, the day I went away from home--when
I came in to say good-bye to him, he was writing a sermon for Easter.
It was just Easter then, don't you remember? I went to the little
church on Kew Green. He read a bit of it out to me--something about
there being the promise of everlasting life in the rising of Christ
from the dead--and yet I know, in his heart, he was cast down in the
very lowest depth of despair."

Janet shook her head up and down. Not one of us is too old to learn
some new mystery in the inner workings of the human machine. To Janet
it was a fairy tale, what had been life and death to the Rev. Samuel
Bishop. But she had achieved her object. Sally was quieter after the
relation of that little story and, seeing in her mood a good
opportunity for suggesting some plans about the future, Janet said
quietly--

"What are your mother and sisters doing now?"

"They've gone back to Cailsham. They've got a school there for little
boys--sons of gentlemen--preparatory for the Grammar School at
Maidstone. The sort of thing that nearly every woman takes up when
she gets as poor as mother is."

Janet left it at that, and set about the getting of a meal, talking
all the time in a light and flippant way about her studio; pointing
humorous descriptions of the managers of firms with whom she had to
deal in her business of designing.

"There's one man," she said. "You know the place up the Tottenham
Court Road--he weighs seventeen stone if he weighs an ounce, and he
comes up to business in the morning, all the way from Turnham Green
in a motor-car that makes the noise of